Name: Andrea Bajani THE ANNIVERSARY with Sam Knight
Start: 2026-07-02T17:30:00+01:00
End: 2026-07-02T18:30:00+01:00
Location: Blackwell's Bookshop

A bold and blistering account of the tyranny of the family and the drive for personal liberation. Winner of Italy's Strega prize.
About this Event

The Anniversary

A son is celebrating a bittersweet anniversary. It is a decade since he saw his parents: the father who ruled through petty acts of intimidation and fear, the mother who silently accepted it, fitting herself in the spaces around others’ lives. As he looks back, he recalls the airless family home, unsettled only by the ringing of a telephone, or a visitor who was soon rejected. And he remembers how he became possessed by the irrepressible desire to be free, to live his own life. But can you ever escape the grip of your origins?

At once unflinchingly honest and razor sharp, The Anniversary is above all a novel of liberation which dismantles the tyranny of the family. It becomes a mirror in which we glimpse something that, even if we have not known it, affects us all.

A bold and blistering account of the tyranny of the family and the drive for personal liberation, Bajani's exquisitely written novel chronicles the narrator's dysfunctional relationship with his parents and how he broke away from their grip.

Andrea Bajani

Andrea Bajani is the author of several award-winning novels including If You Kept a Record of Sins, Every Promise andThe Book of Homes, which have been translated into over twenty languages.The Anniversary was a huge best-seller in Italy and won the Strega Prize in 2025. Born in Rome, he now teaches creative writing at Rice University in Texas.

Sam Knight

Sam Knight is a British journalist who has covered subjects such the plans for the death of the Queen, sandwiches and late capitalism, art fraud; plus profiles of Ronnie O'Sullivan, Jeremy Corbyn, and Theresa May. His work for the Long Read section of the Guardian and for The New Yorker has become influential and wildly shared. 'London Bridge is Down', published in 2017, was viewed 4 million times and remains the most popular Guardian long read ever published. Knight, a staff writer at The New Yorker since 2018, has won two Foreign Press Association awards and was shortlisted for the 2018 Orwell Prize for political writing. The Premonitions Bureau is his first book and a shop bestseller.